


Uncanny Valley

by thevoiceoflightcity



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Aliens, Angst, Coins are Two-Sided, Gen, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Introspection, Time Lords Are Aliens, Uncanny Valley, ah forget it, general enigmatic nonsense, not quite dr nyarlathotep but heading in that direction, not quite there's a narrator but they're unnamed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 19:39:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7770421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thevoiceoflightcity/pseuds/thevoiceoflightcity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are two sides to every story. (Microfic.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. part one

The Doctor has a long history of wearing increasingly ridiculous clothes and behaving like a cosmic five-year-old a significant amount of the time. 

It’s hard to actually look at _him_ underneath the rainbow coat or the bow-tie or the tendency to twirl around two hundred and seventy degrees to the left instead of just turning right; your eyes naturally slide off his face onto whatever ostentatious thing he’s wearing that day. He’s blatantly anachronistic, talks so fast that by the time you manage to say ‘Excuse me, I don’t think there actually is such a thing as a Ice Cream Inspection Bureau,’ he’s already reprogramming your VCR to vaporize Sontarans. Sometimes he says things that are so obviously rubbish you can’t help but agree to them, and then he’s gone and your head is still whirling. He’s hard to _focus_ on. Hard to see.

Only very few people ever realize that this is intentional.

The story is this: a very long time ago, Rassilon conquered Gallifrey, and (almost as an afterthought) the universe. Very nearly the first thing he did with this power was remake every sentient species of the universe in his image. The ones that wouldn’t easily re-evolve into humanoid forms, or that wouldn’t stay in them, were massacred, slowly and methodically. The ones that couldn’t actually survive in humanoid forms died out on their own. 

There are some still that look nothing like Time Lords, and there are very few races that got it perfectly. Humans were one of them. 

The thing people keep forgetting is that real perfection, when evolving on separate planets, is impossible. After all, there are some things - respiratory bypass, regeneration, superefficient binary vascular system with air-sac lungs - advantages that Rassilon never actually wanted any other species to have. And these things aren’t immediately noticeable, but they are there. 

Now, if there’s one thing that humans are very, very good at, it’s identifying other humans, especially faces. We are programmed, somewhere deep down, to recognize each other. Whatever happens. This mechanism is so strong that we see old men in the crags of rocks and smiling children in the clouds. It is extremely exact. Have you ever seen pictures of old porcelain dolls or plastic-faced robots that are somehow too realistic? The animal part of your brain recognizes something _other_ masquerading as human, and rings a million alarms in your subconscious. 

Now imagine what it’s going to do to actual aliens. 

The Doctor, if he would ever stand still, does not look particularly human. Oh, all the general contours are right, in some bodies more than others. A computer, even a very sophisticated one, wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. In video, it’s less noticeable; in pictures, it practically disappears. 

But if you ever meet the Doctor, really looked at him - 

The thing that Rassilon never thought of (or perhaps he simply didn’t care) is that physical appearance is not the only important thing. Look at the Doctor, and yes the face may be human, but the creature animating it is not and never will be. He smiles too fast, bright and sharp like razors, moves snap-quick, doesn’t breathe near often enough. Sometimes his mind works so fast he’s solved the problem before you’ve quite realized there was one in the first place, and of course he’s never going to wait for you to catch up. He is alien, and even if the conscious part of your mind doesn’t realize it, there is always that quiet ringing alarm bell at the back of your head. 

_Other_ , it says. _Predator,_ it says. _Run,_ it says. 

And that’s when he is trying his utter best to look human, employing every possible trick to put your hindbrain off the scent. 

What happens when he drops the act? What happens when he lets go? What happens, in short, when he stops caring?

Make the Doctor angry. Scare him. Threaten someone he loves. Push him too far, and watch him stop.

The Doctor without the lies - there is no way, no snowball’s chance in hell that it could be mistaken for human. 

Because it’s not, you know. No matter how much it likes to pretend. 

Not at all.


	2. part two

Humans move too smoothly.

It’s a small thing to fixate on – it’s a _stupid_ thing to fixate on, when he’s been traveling with them for centuries and it’s the least of the differences between his kind and theirs anyway – but it’s there. They move too smoothly, sliding along in one long motion like snakes and paradoxes, and sometimes he can’t help cringing at the sheer alien strangeness of it. It’s not like that’s all, either. Their skin is just a little bit too oily and warm for comfort, the texture ever so slightly wrong in his hand. They breathe far too fast, blink far too often, and there’s something just _off_ about how dull and empty and _dead_ they are to telepathic senses. 

It scares him. Especially when he knows that everything like him is gone, that there will never be anybody who looks _right_ ever again. Especially when he knows that humans are the closest he will ever get, that the only place to go is the mirror and that’s not an option anyway – because the one thing worse than the company of humans is the company of the monster that _made_ him the Last –

It scares him.


End file.
